steam-engine made possible the dynamo, the dynamo made possible the electric light. In its turn the electric light may lead to wonders still more extraordinary. The degree to which invention has contributed to civilization is far from suspected by the careless observer. Almost everything we have or use is the fruit of invention. Man might be defined as the animal that invents. The air we breathe and the water we drink are provided by Nature, but we drink water from a vessel of some kind, an invention of man. Even if we drink from a shell or a gourd, we shape it to serve a new purpose. If we want our air hotter or colder, we resort to invention, and a vast amount of ingenuity has been expended upon putting air in motion by means of fans, blowers, ventilators, etc. We take but a small part of our food as animals do--in the natural state. The savage who first crushed some kernels of wheat between two stones invented flour, and we are yet hard at it inventing improvements upon his process. The earliest inventions probably had reference to the procuring and preparing of food, and the ingenuity of man is still exercised upon these problems more eagerly than ever before. During the last fifty years the power of man to produce food has increased more than during the preceding fifteen centuries. Sixty years ago a large part of the wheat and other grain raised in the world was cut, a handful at a time, with a scythe, and a man could not reap much more than a quarter of an acre a day. With a McCormick reaper a man and two horses will cut from fifteen to twenty acres of grain a day. In the threshing of grain, invention has achieved almost as much. A man with a machine will thresh ten times as much as he formerly could with a flail. It is less than sixty years since matches have come into common use. Many old men remember the time in this country when a fire could be kindled only with the embers from another fire, as there were no such things as matches. Most of us who have reached the age of forty remember the abominable, clumsy sulphur-matches of 1860, as bulky as they were unpleasant. And yet the first sulphur-matches, made about 1830, cost ten cents a hundred. To-day the safety match, certain and odorless, is sold at one-tenth of this price. The introduction of kerosene was one of the blessings of modern life. It added several hours a day to the useful, intelligent life of man, and who can estimate the influence of these evening hours upon the advance of civilization? The evening, after the day's work is done, has been the only hour when the workingman could read. Before cheap and good lights were given him, reading was out of the question. Gas marked a step in advance, but only for large towns, and now electricity bids fair soon to displace gas; and we hear vague suggestions of a luminous ether that will flood houses with a soft glow like that of sunlight. TOWNSEND AND DRAKE--THE INTRODUCTION OF COAL OIL.